Google App Draw Plans for a Shelf

Trax: Digitizing retail stores with Google Deject Platform to take shelves from image to insight

Near Trax

Trax is a world leader in figurer vision solutions for retail, ranking in the Top 25 Fastest Growing Companies on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 list. The Trax platform enables tighter execution controls in-store and the ability to leverage competitive insights to unlock revenue opportunities at all points of auction.

Industries: Retail & Consumer Appurtenances, Technology

Location: State of israel

Trax deploys Google Cloud Platform in a multi-cloud service-based infrastructure for increased stability, scalability, security, and commercial flexibility.

Google Deject Results

• Provides a flexible environment that accommodates multiple deject vendor and market integrations
• Scales at speed, allowing AI recognition models to quickly adapt and respond to clients' changing needs
• Opens up new markets with a multi-cloud infrastructure that can ease retailers' concerns well-nigh commercial rivalries

Recognizes about 1B products from images monthly

In competitive markets with tight margins, every particular counts for brick-and-mortar stores. Decisions that put the right products and promotions in the right place on shelves can hateful the departure between survival and success. That's where real-time data becomes invaluable. Retailers and consumer brands are turning to information analysis and AI to draw out as much insight as possible and gain an edge. They tin can wait through inventories and sales receipts to run across what items are coming in and how well they're selling, simply it'south much harder to find information on what happens in between.

That'due south where Trax comes in, with an image-recognition platform built on powerful AI technology, to scan individual products and bank check shelf display, production prices, and promotions. Clients can become existent-fourth dimension insights into how their products are performing in their exact locations on shelves, and then they can react accordingly. "Our mission is to digitize the store," says Yair Adato, CTO at Trax. "Nosotros tin can collect data from multiple devices and turn that into a digital representation of shelves in the physical shop."

"Working with big retailers meant that we had to exist able to recognize tens of thousands of products from images. We needed a new solution with massive compute power and the flexibility to integrate with our existing cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud Platform meets those needs for us."

—Yair Adato, CTO, Trax

When Trax launched in 2010, its first clients were consumer brands that wanted to know more well-nigh how their products were being displayed and promoted in retail stores. The company grew apace, acquiring world-famous clients such every bit Coca-Cola. Past 2017, Trax started to piece of work with large retailers likewise, which was a corking opportunity that came with unique challenges. First, these new clients had security and commercial concerns, which required Trax to diversify its existing cloud infrastructure. 2d, the sheer scale of retailers' product ranges meant that Trax's platform had to cope with new technical challenges of calibration and complexity. For Trax, the solution has been Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

"Working with big retailers meant that nosotros had to exist able to recognize tens of thousands of products from images," says Yair. "We needed a new solution with massive compute power and the flexibility to integrate with our existing cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud Platform meets those needs for us."

Google Cloud Platform for power, calibration, and flexibility

For its products to work, Trax needs to brand sure that a number of complex operations become smoothly. Ingesting, processing, and analyzing hundreds of thousands of images a 24-hour interval requires huge resources, and from the start, Trax knew that only a cloud-based infrastructure could cope with its demands. With information streaming in from multiple services, Trax adopted a microservice-based architecture to handle the complexity of the tasks.

Too every bit technical challenges, retail stores had specific concerns near the security of their data and where information technology was being stored. Retail clients fabricated information technology clear to Trax that they wanted its services to be costless of any links to the retail market, in order to safeguard their information from competitors. Trax saw an opportunity to both reassure its new clients and build resilience in its platform with a multi-cloud infrastructure. The visitor embarked on a 3-calendar month trial of the leading cloud vendors, and decided on GCP for its price-effectiveness and ease of use. "Our engineers found they just clicked most easily with GCP," says Yair. "Their opinion carried a lot of weight in the terminal decision."

For its new multi-cloud infrastructure, Trax planned in advance what the compages would wait like and how the clouds would relate to each other. Specifically, it considered whether in that location would exist a master-slave model, or whether the 2 clouds could operate independently of each other. Given the commercial needs of its clients, Trax opted for the latter, building an infrastructure that switches betwixt clouds if needed, with no loss of service. Equally the mainstay of Trax's GCP implementation, Compute Engine instances allow the visitor to replicate existing tasks and services with ease. With the ability to spin upward and shut down servers as needed, Trax can now respond instantly to market place changes that reveal trending merchandising display techniques or fifty-fifty provide valuable upsell opportunities.

"We've been using as much of the Google Deject ecosystem every bit we can. The products integrate very well, and the platform as a whole works well in a multi-deject solution. And if we need to, nosotros can run everything from Google Cloud Platform itself."

—Yair Adato, CTO, Trax

With and so many dissimilar sources of data, Trax deployed a range of managed solutions from GCP, such as Cloud Storage, Deject SQL for Postgres databases, and tertiary-party integrations bachelor on the Google Cloud Marketplace. Meanwhile, Cloud Pub/Sub gives the company a articulate and like shooting fish in a barrel-to-apply messaging solution that helps all the components in its infrastructure run smoothly.

Trax then began migrating VMs using Velostrata, which enables an easier process and frees up developers' time so they can continue unlocking and building on data. "Information technology reduces the time to migrate instances to GCP from 2 weeks to just a few hours. Our DevOps guys love information technology," says Paulina Fogel, VP of Strategic Alliances at Trax.

The company has also begun working with Kubernetes, a container orchestration organization originally designed by Google. With GCP, it tin be managed with Google Kubernetes Engine simply Kubernetes itself is open up source and can be deployed in different means across different platforms. Using Kubernetes allows Trax to automate and speed up its microservices, and at the same time brand these processes available to its other deject instances.

"We've been using as much of the Google Cloud ecosystem as we tin can," says Yair. "The products integrate very well, and the platform as a whole works well in a multi-deject solution. And if we demand to, we can run everything from Google Cloud Platform itself."

Multi-cloud resilience, rock-solid stability

With the adoption of GCP, Trax has congenital a resilient multi-cloud infrastructure capable of meeting the demands of the company's growing success without disrupting the stability of the platform. For Yair, a multi-cloud solution ways having the best of both worlds. "We had to think advisedly nearly the implementation, but it means we can now get the right tools for the right task and take the flexibility to integrate with multiple vendors and marketplaces," he says.

Working with retailers ways that Trax'south platform has to perform at a much college capacity than before. A typical consumer brand might accept two,000 products, which Trax'south platform would have to learn and recognize from images. A retailer, by comparison, might have around threescore,000 products, all of which take to be captured, candy, and learned past the recognition model. Today, Trax applied science easily handles more than a 1000000 images every day and recognizes nigh a billion products every month.

"From a business organisation betoken of view, Google Cloud Platform has been vital for achieving our strategic goals of reaching more than retailers. Nosotros have a stable, robust multi-cloud infrastructure that also meets the commercial needs of our customers. Nosotros can accost the market in a much better way than before."

—Paulina Fogel, VP of Strategic Alliances, Trax

Every bit well every bit stability, GCP also gives Trax the flexibility and ease of employ to calibration quickly if it needs to. For instance, if a brand starts a new promotion that involves repackaging its products, Trax has to assemble new images, retrain its AI recognition models, and then redeploy those models dorsum into its products. With GCP, Trax can now add resources such as compute power and memory on demand to respond rapidly and effectively to its clients' needs.

"From a business betoken of view, Google Cloud Platform has been vital for achieving our strategic goals of reaching more retailers," says Paulina. "We have a stable, robust multi-cloud infrastructure that also meets the commercial needs of our customers. Nosotros can address the market in a much improve way than before."

Trax continues to look for new improvements and products for its clients. The company has been incorporating IoT devices into its processes and is also exploring augmented reality. Trax'southward close relationship with Google Deject has been primal to navigating the mode forward as it experiments with new products such as Google Cloud IoT and Google ARCore, equally Yair explains:

"The partnership with Google Cloud has been very of import for us, in terms of access to new products and working with the production squad," he says. "As well as the technical partnership, Google is a great company to work with in general. Our cultures fit very well with each other."

Well-nigh Trax

Trax is a world leader in computer vision solutions for retail, ranking in the Top 25 Fastest Growing Companies on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 list. The Trax platform enables tighter execution controls in-store and the power to leverage competitive insights to unlock revenue opportunities at all points of sale.

Industries: Retail & Consumer Goods, Engineering science

Location: State of israel

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Source: https://cloud.google.com/customers/trax